World, Mostly Turning

Jim's an engineer, which means he's not quite like the other boys. ;-) On top of his engineeriness, I strongly suspect that he's dyslexic. Listening to him read out loud is an adventure--he either reverses the order of letters (which is why we eat tofu, but Jim eats tufo) or he inserts letters and syllables into words that have never been there before. Sometimes he makes up entirely new words and I have to back-calculate to figure out what he meant (best one to date: insensationable). His spelling is atrocious, and he generally has to write and rewrite emails at least twice before they say what he intends them to say. I tease him by telling people that Jim doesn't have a first language.

Which is why I'll be living with a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, or Toller for short, and Jim will be living with a Nova Scotia Duck Trolling Retriever, or Troller. I suppose we could drag the dog behind the boat and see if she can catch ducks that way...

Jim finally made it the end of BtVS S5. We watched the last two episodes in one evening because he couldn't wait to find out how it turned out. Before he started seeing me (and therefore before he was properly introduced to the Buffyverse), he'd only ever seen the scene from Weight of the World where Buffy was suffocating Dawn with a pillow. It's no wonder he didn't think the rest of the episode was worth sticking around for.

I don't know how he thought The Gift was going to end, but not in the way that it did. "But... but... " he exclaimed, running over to the bookshelf with all my DVDs on it. "Buffy's on the cover of Season 6. *And* Season 7! She must come back, right?"

I grinned at him and said, "Maybe Seasons 6 and 7 are Buffybot the Vampire Slayer."

::snickers::

The next day, I made him read All Set Down, my alternative ending to The Gift. He was a bit taken aback by the goriness, but thought it made as much sense as Joss's ending.

The sale of Jim's old house (which, technically, is newer than the new house, but never mind) closed yesterday. Which meant that a goodly part of the weekend was spent moving two trailer-loads of odds and ends from the old to the new. We have an unusually large entranceway--the front door opens where two wide corridors meet, so the zillions of boxes were dumped there because that's what was easiest and it was starting to rain. There were so many boxes, however, that they were stacked up nearly to the height of my head, and we had just a narrow alleyway through which to walk.

Jim's kids are out of school and on their week-here, week-there summer schedule with us and their mother. Jim took this week off work to stay home with them (LittlestJim is only eight years old, so leaving him home alone with a pool isn't an option). I had hoped that he would spend at least part of the day carting boxes from the front hall into the basement. I got home last night to discover that he had indeed gotten sick of the mess and spent quite some time cleaning... the garage.

The garage. He even vacuumed it. Meanwhile, none of the boxes in the house had been touched. ::headdesk::

I think it's actually safer to leave LittlestJim unsupervised for a day than it is his father.

~*~
In other news, my father (also a man who is not entirely normal :-) got some fan mail yesterday. He's written two murder mysteries that are set in St. John's, Newfoundland, in the 1940s and is currently working on a third (which, yes, I'm supposed to be betaing, but I've been a bit distracted by writing fanfic lately, and I'm about to become a lot distracted by Harry Potter). His hero is Inspector Eric Stride. This was the email he received:

Hello Mr. Curran,

I absolutely love your Inspector Stride Novels. I have them both and when I first read them, I could not put them down. I think the fact that the mysteries are about Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders, allows me to relate to things like the language "Newfoundeese", etc! You are definitely by far my favorite author, and I know you may be busy, but I would love for you to write more Inspector Stride mysteries, like 100 more! I'd buy them all! I LOVE the stories! I simply cannot put into words how much I appreciate your work! Thank-you! Please write more! =)

[Dad's biggest fan],
Woody Point, Newfoundland

I suspect his feet have not yet touched the floor. :-)

As many of you know, after 2+ years of being in a long-distance relationship with Jim, I moved to Peterborough a few months back so that we could live in the same city. He has three kids, while I have none, so I was the more mobile of the pair.

Not surprisingly, Jim owns a house. It’s cute, but small—it’s really a two-bedroom house that he strong-armed into being a three-bedroom house by making the main-floor den his bedroom. It accommodates his bed and a dresser, but not much else. Other than the bathroom, it’s the smallest room in the house, so there’s no way of squishing me and my stuff in there.

As for me, I’m living in an apartment at the moment—my thought was that I’d get to know the city a little bit and decide if I wanted to cohabitate with Jim and kidlets before buying something myself. We’ve looked at a wide variety of houses—wee houses that’d be just for me and much larger ones that would accommodate three children, one relatively normal adult, and one, well, slightly less normal one.

I’m 43. I’ve lived alone for most of my adult life. I haven’t lived with children since I was one myself. I didn’t have to take the Meyers-Briggs test to know that I score very highly as “introvert.” If Jim and decide to live together, I need what my equally introverted sister describes as a “cave”—that is, a place that I can go and sit quietly on my own when I need to recover from the unaccustomed company. This could be my own place or just my own room within a larger house.

So, the options here are three: (1) Buy my own little house (a/k/a “cave”) and visit often. (2) Renovate Jim’s house so that it has more than one bathroom and a master bedroom that is bigger than a shoebox. (3) Buy a bigger house that will fit all of us.

All three options have their advantages and drawbacks, of course, and I seem to be caught in an endless cycle of dithering and changing my mind. And so, a poll (but one without ticky boxes, because the options have too many characters for LJ):

Kristina should:

(A) Buy her own house. You can decorate it however you like, and you won’t have to pick up after Jim (a/k/a “entropy with feet”) or his kids. When you get tired of going home to an empty place night after night after night after night, you can fill it with cats and become known as that eccentric old lady of uncertain sanity at the end of the street who frightens small children.

(B) Put an addition on Jim’s house. This is probably the least expensive of the three options, but also entails the most work and probably the most stress. Have you ever heard of a major renovation that was finished on time and on budget? And the mess—you’ll be finding drywall dust in your underwear for *years*. But don’t worry—you can split the proceedings of the increased value of the house when you sell it during the resulting divorce.

(C) Pool resources with Jim and buy a bigger house. There are some lovely big old houses in Peterborough that would go great with your antiques and that would provide you with a “cave.” They tend to be pricey, mind you. But, hey, soul-crushingly large mortgages are fun! And eating is overrated anyway.

::collapses in a heap of indecision::

I'm not much of a shopper. Mostly I buy books, CDs, and DVDs, which means that I mostly buy things online. When I break down and decide that I need new clothes, I tend to buy stuff that'll last. Practical stuff. Stuff that'll stand up to repeated washings and doesn't require dry cleaning. Stuff that never goes out of style because it's never really in style. I generally dress tidily and respectably and reasonably attractively, but stylishly? Not so much. I also don't wear make-up unless I'm going to a wedding or something. Since I generally try to avoid weddings, it doesn't happen that often.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm really a girl.

Jim, OTOH, doesn't mind shopping, but he doesn't like to spend money. I'm not sure how he reconciles those two things, but he does. Generally it means that he's willing to tag along to the mall with Daughter o' Jim as long as she doesn't take hours to pick something out or ask him to pay for too much.

This weekend, however, we both had to put all that aside and Get The Christmas Shopping Done. I've never spent so many consecutive hours in stores in my life. I thought my feet were going to fall off. I had to set up an IV of white wine to recover when I got home. For his part, Jim more or less melted his credit card: after a series of unusual purchases, he discovered that it wouldn't work anymore. An hour later, the credit card company phoned him to make sure that he'd actually been the one doing the buying--they'd frozen his account because they thought his card had been stolen. Heee.

The purchases that caused all this? (1) Jim discovered online shopping on Saturday night after Round 1 at the stores and ordered a whack of DVDs. (2) He bought me a ring. It has not yet been established whether or not he's officially divorced, and he's kind of squeamish about the subject of marriage, having come out of a particularly bad one several years ago, so we're calling it a "commitment ring." He's willing to call it an engagement ring as long as people know that we're going to be engaged for about 20 years. I told him that if he ever actually wants me to marry him, he's gonna have to get down on one knee and propose properly.

Looking at rings accounted for a fair amount of the shopping on Saturday as neither of us could make up our minds. We had several potential candidates and finally drifted into one last jewellery store just to be sure. I started trying on everything, just for fun, including a $10,000 ring with three fairly honking diamonds on it. (I had to--when am I ever gonna wear something like that again?) I also tried on another one with much smaller, but very sparkly, diamonds, and damned if I didn't come over all girly just looking at it. It was still a wee bit pricey, though no where near 10K, and I was just kidding, really. Then we went for lunch, and I was about to tell him to get me (the much less expensive) one that we'd seen somewhere else when he suggested we go back to the last store again. I think all the twinkling hypnotized him or something. It's now in being resized to fit my finger, and I really want to get it back because it's just so pretty!

And so we learned two lessons this weekend: I am, indeed, a girl, and Jim's not nearly as much of a skinflint as he thinks he is.

I only had one day--Sunday--at SFX this year. I missed both the Canadian Browncoat lunch and dinner/Shindig on Saturday. :-( As I was there for 2.5 days last year, with the Serenity fantable occupying much of my time, this year's quick Sunday breeze-through left me feeling a little as if I'd only gotten SFX Digest experience. Still, it was fun. And there was Gaius glee, which a total bonus.

( SFX 2006. Not for the faint of modem. )

Now I want to know who's going to be at SFX 2007!

I was just on the phone with Jim discussing tickets for William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy's appearance at SFX in September. In an attempt to be all frugal and whatnot, I suggested just getting silver passes. That way, he could get one autograph, I'd get the other, and we'd save a little money. Celebrity whore that he has become, however, that was just not enough--he wants two autographs from each of them (one on his DVD inserts and one on a photograph he bought at TT20). He couldn't quite talk himself into the VIP pass, but was panting after the gold one. So, gold passes it is. And he wants all four autographs that we are now entitled to.

He so owes me now. ::evil laugh::

When looking at the SFX website, I saw that James Callis, who plays Dr. Gaius Baltar on BSG, is going to be there. Yay! I only started watching the series two weeks ago, but he's already my favourite character. He's such a spineless loon--he just cracks me up. I need a Gaius icon.

And, of course, yay for Morena Baccarin and Juliet Landau too. Oh, and Carrie Fisher--I have Star Wars episodes IV-VI on DVD. It's going to be a busy day.

Still haven't posted about WriterCon--will do that tomorrow when I need a break from the cod.

To those on my flist who get CBC or CTV: don't forget to look for me on TV tomorrow morning! The memorial service starts at 8:30 am EDT and will be broadcast nationwide on both channels. Cross your fingers that it's not pouring rain--all the women in the choir will be wearing white blouses and we're not allowed umbrellas. O_O

This weekend is going to be another exciting first for me: Jim is arriving tonight with both sons in tow. Four people in my little apartment. Urk. For some reason, his company chose to give him today as a holiday (as opposed to everyone else in the country, who will get Monday off). At least that'll give me a day to recover (and edit) before coming back to work on Tuesday.

Happy Canada Day and Independence Day! ::waves flags::

So, it's back to Cuba again. Well, not literally, as I've never been there before, but theoretically after not going to Havana with my father last month.

After checking out hotel prices in New York - recovering from the resulting mutual heart attacks - Jim and I went in search of somewhere less expensive to spend a week together. May isn't exactly high season for the Caribbean, which means rates are lower, so we're off to Paradisus Varadero on May 20. Five stars! Woot! I expect it'll be stinkin' hot, but that's OK - they have a swim-up bar in the pool. :-) Also, I'll consider it training for Atlanta in July.

I've been seeing Jim for nearly two years now, but he lives three hours to the southwest of me - we've never actually spent an entire week together. I hope we still like each other by the time we get back.

I toast you all with fruity rum drinks!

I debated on changing my LJ layout tonight to one that will list tags someplace handy, but wound up scurrying back to my current format out of fear that I'd mess my banner up. I'm such a wimp.

Anyone know offhand which S2 styles include the tag lists? Perhaps I'll try again sometime when I'm feeling a little braver.

Went to Peterborough for a really long weekend over Easter (I took Thursday off too). It was Jim's 46th birthday on Sunday, so there were gifts to buy and restaurants to go out to and those things really should be singular but it's less fun to write them that way. We also had three (definitely plural, this time) Easter egg hunts on Sunday with the boys: first Jim hid eggs for them, then LittlestJim insisted on rehiding them for us to find, and finally, not to be outdone, MiddleJim had to have a go at it too. Some of the eggs were rather melty after all that handling, but the boys didn't seem to mind. Then we all played a game of Monopoly and LittlestJim won. Again. The next Donald Trump - you heard it here first.

But I have the means for revenge now. LittlestJim's birthday was in February and I bought him the board game Careers. I used to play it all the time when I was growing up and figured he'd like it because (a) he likes board games, and (b) it has money in it. What I didn't tell him was that I am the Undisputed Careers Champion of All Time. I haven't lost a game of Careers in decades. LittlestJim is going down. Ha!

In other news, it doesn't look like I'm going to be a university professor anytime soon. I'm pretty sure they're interviewing by now and my phone has been quite silent. ::pouts::

And finally, my apartment is still too quiet. Linus's crate has been temporarily retired to my mother's basement, but his baskets and toys are still here. I restrain myself from playing with his toys, but occasionally lean over the baskets for a whiff of eau de chien. It's just not right that he isn't here.

I miss you, little dog.